Evening Republican, Volume 16, Number 288, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 3 December 1912 — IN THE SEWING ROOM [ARTICLE]

IN THE SEWING ROOM

SHORT BITS OF WISDOM THAT ARE OF VALUE. Will Be Fouqd to Be Labor Savers aa Well as Economical —How Ruety Needles May Be EffectiveI ly Cleaned. When darning a rent In woolen goods, and It is impossible to ravel out the goods itself for thread to dam with, use long hairs from your own head. The loose weave of the wool loses the hair in Its meshes, and so the darn becomes Invisible. The best way to clean rusty needles is to run them up and down in the earth. Just go out in the garden and stick the needles in the ground, then pull them out. Have the needles threaded, with the thread tied double, so there will be something to catch hold of to extract the needle from the earth. This method is even better than using an emery bag. When buttons come off shoes and you sew them on again, run through all the other buttons with the same thread with which ybu replace the missing ones. It will strengthen them all and make the next button sewing a task far in the future. Small holes in black or white kid gloves can easily be mended with court-plaster. Cut the plaster a little larger than the hole itself,®and stick it to the under part of the glove directly over the hole, pressing the kid down smooth on the sticky surface of the plaster. This will last as long as the gloves themselves do. If the tip breaks off the end of your scissors, the jagged point may be smoothed off by rubbing it on a whetstone. The point will be uneven, but It will cut all right. The same treatment may be used for blunted needles. Glove clasps, or snap fasteners are better to use as a fastening for plackets on cloth dresses than are hooks and eyes. But when the latter are used be sure to buy those having the peat eyes instead of the ordinary loop eye. Silk petticoats always give way first at the seam; therefore, when you buy a new one, sew silk seam binding over each seam on the right side. This will often serve as a cure for wornout petticoats. When doing drawn work or hemstitching on linen, soap the place where the threads are to be drawn, using a thick soap lather and a soft brush. After the work is once started, it will be an easy matter to draw out the threads, as they slip very easily on the soapy surface.